My Last Week In Viçosa

Our Zone T-shirt.  I'm a bit hard to find.  I have white hair in this photo and standing next to the sweating guy.
 Guess which one is Elder Rutledge?

I got the news last night that I'm getting transferred so that'll be exciting.  Five Reais to anybody who guesses my next area correctly. I'm going to miss Viçosa because I sure learned a whole lot here and grew a ton.

So I was asked if I already have had children by some lady this week.  I told her that I was 20 and that I'm not allowed to have children until after my mission.  She then asked me why I wanted to be an old dad. Yep....

Oh the abomination of the week goes out to the 14 year old girl we talked to who has a boyfriend who is 23.  We asked her if she found it to be the least bit strange and she answered no.

There's also a church really close to our house that likes to sing a lot of our hymns.  I understand hymns like "I Need Thee Every Hour" and "Nearer My God To Thee", but they were singing "Come, Come Ye Saints" yesterday and I have no idea as to how it pertains to their religion.  I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if they were to sing "If You Could Hie To Kolob" in their next meeting.

I was called out of nowhere during this week’s sacrament meeting to give the first talk after the opening hymn which was loads of fun. I said a quick prayer and gave a little talk on the Sacrament, which I felt went over pretty well! So that's my tender mercy of the week!

So we had some baptisms this week!  The first we held at 2:00 in the afternoon for our investigators/recent converts Valeria e Veríssimo!  They're awesome!  We found them while searching for less actives and they accepted everything, could repeat doctrine, volunteered to pray, and even made their own baptismal meeting invites.  We had to baptize Valeria twice because she didn't go all the way down the first time, but the second time she said she felt so good and she just left the font all happy and smiling.

We then held the next baptismal meeting at 9:00 in the afternoon for our investigator Neto.  We planned to baptize him at 7:00, but we had some issues come up so we had to delay a little bit.  He's really cool; he lives in another city but attends church here because it's the closest one to him.  When we first talked with him he'd already read a substantial amount of the Book of Mormon.  When we taught him the Word of Wisdom, we asked him what things he thought God wouldn't want us to drink or smoke and the first thing he said was coffee!  Yeah he's really cool.  It was an amazing baptism and just listening to him talk about how he felt afterwards was absolutely awesome!  The branch out here is growing and it makes me so excited to see where it will go in the future.

The baptism of Neto.  He was baptized by his nephew who just became a Priest that same week.

Well that's it for now, I've got to find out where my next area is and get a new companion.  Tchau! 

Elder Johnson

Bye Companion!

Die Companion!